Abstract
Homogeneous mixing of microscopic volume fluids at low Reynolds number is of great significance for a wide range of chemical, biological, and medical applications. An efficient jet mixer with arrays of micronozzles was designed and fabricated using additive manufacturing (three-dimensional (3D) printing) technology for applications in centrifugal microfluidic platforms. The contact surface of miscible liquids was enhanced significantly by impinging plumes from two opposite arrays of micronozzles to improve mixing performance. The mixing efficiency was evaluated and compared with the commonly used Y-shaped micromixer. Effective mixing in the jet mixer was achieved within a very short timescale (3s). This 3D printed jet mixer has great potential to be implemented in applications by being incorporated into multifarious 3D printing devices in microfluidic platforms.
Highlights
Centrifugal microfluidic discs, known as “lab-on-a-disc”(LOD) can eliminate the requirement for an external pump and complicated fluidic interconnections
Because only microscopic amounts of samples and reagents are consumed in such microfluidic systems, much less waste is generated
We report a jet collision micromixer fabricated using a low-cost fused deposition modelling (FDM) printer
Summary
Centrifugal microfluidic discs, known as “lab-on-a-disc”(LOD) can eliminate the requirement for an external pump and complicated fluidic interconnections. In contrast with the active types, the passive mixers generally accomplish mixing by adding geometric obstructions or altering geometries of the flow channels with no external energy sources. The fast-developing additive manufacturing (AM) technology with reasonable fabrication efficiency has provided a powerful tool to fabricate high precision, integrated microfluidic systems. In addition to many other applications, much research in applying 3D printing technologies to make mixers have been reported in recent years for different applications. By controlling the distance between the neighboring filament lines and taking on the additive manufacturing nature of FDM, a jet mixer with large arrays of micronozzles (microchannels) was generated in a vertical. The mixing efficiency of the jet mixer was experimentally measured by contrastively analyzing with a Y-shaped mixer
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